No, the Summer of Donald Trump Isn't Over Yet

The so-called Summer of Trump has elevated a number of longstanding beefs into proper blood feuds: the Republican establishment against the conservative grassroots, for example, or the party’s nativist constituency against its globalist elites. Until Scott Walker’s withdrawal from the race on Monday, it was possible to look at one of those feuds—the tension between political scientists and the political press over what campaign developments are really worth our attention—and conclude that it was so nasty only because the stakes were so small.

The debate has long been over a question neatly crystallized in the title of Thomas M. Holbrook’s 1996 book Do Campaigns Matter? This is an open debate within the academy, but there is effective unanimity among political scientists that the press regularly exaggerate the extent to which campaigns do matter, and tend to look in the wrong places when they do. The political press mistake short-term blips like poll surges as evidence of durable changes, they argue. In so doing, journalists dangerously disregard structural factors that tend to bestow upon presidential elections a familiar architecture even as context shifts and the characters who inhabit them change every four years.